Certain words carry with them the full weight of their meaning for all to understand. Cancer; murder; rape; death; insanity. Every right-minded person feels the unease and distress that these words bring whether they have personally experienced them or not.
But “adopted” isn’t such a word.
“Adopted” passes most people by, leaving them no more touched by it than by the breeze of the day.
‘Me and your mum — we adopted you as a baby. You are adopted.’
Seconds after hearing it stutter from my dad’s lips I choked. An enormous pressure pushed down on every part of my body. I felt crushed by the air around me, compressed so that I could take no air into myself. A ceaseless head-rush made everything spin. I struggled against the pressure. Blood surged to my limbs and muscles and I forced myself up out of the sofa. I pit myself against the pressing air and pushed through it to the downstairs toilet.
I retched and cried.
I felt as though my life was a lake into which my father had just thrown the word “adopted” like a pebble. As it hit the surface I had immediately felt the first ripples, but I knew that slowly the pebble was sinking. Deeper and deeper. It would soon hit the bottom where it would lay, irretrievable and unchangeable, forever. It would become part of me.
After a few minutes, the retching subsided. The tears too. My mind regained some focus and I thought about the two people I had known as my mother and father. Neither had followed me to the toilet. They both remained in the living-room.
The two people I thought I could always trust. The people I thought would never have a reason to lie to me.
And yet they had been proficient and consistent liars for all these years. Every birthday and Christmas. Every personal moment shared with them. They had been nothing but deceivers of the worst kind.
All the talk about “always loving me” and “you made our lives worth living”. Just words. No real love at all. How could there be? They were liars. People who love you don’t lie to you. People who love you don’t deceive you your whole life.
A vicious heat rose from my chest and shoulders, spread over my neck and up to my head. Humiliation burned through me. I had been the last to know. Everyone had been laughing at me. Talking about me behind my back. The nasty little secret that I knew nothing about.
I slammed my fists against the toilet floor. Banged them hard, again and again.
‘No, no, no, no, no, no.’
Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps they were trying to make me feel better about the madness in some way. But that made no sense. My mind was bullshitting me.
‘Shut up, Christine. It’s no joke. They’ve been lying to you your whole life.’
I stormed out of the toilet and charged upstairs, knocking photo frames off the wall as I went.
Me and Dad — fishing.
I heard them smash against the floor, but I didn’t look back.
I kicked the bedroom door shut behind me and dived onto the bed, face down.
And I screamed. Into the duvet, I screamed and roared. I shouted and cried and I wailed and thrashed like a baby.
I tasted sick in my mouth and spat onto the bedroom floor. I didn’t give a fuck about them and their house anymore. Fuck them.
I curled up in the duvet, wrapped it around me and curled as tight as I could. I pulled it over my head. Every part of me was hidden. Hidden from monsters and ghosts. Hidden from the world. Hidden from my mum’s shrill voice downstairs. Hidden from Dad’s low mumble. Hidden from them both. Mum and Dad.
I thought about all the physical characteristics I shared with them. My dad’s eyes; Mum’s nose; Grandad’s chin. All of these were nothing but coincidence. I had been so blind. I could see that all of these likenesses had been exaggerated. The reality was, I didn’t look like any of these strangers. Michael didn’t have Grandma’s wicked grin. Rose didn’t have Auntie Jane’s dimple. In fact, Michael and Rose didn’t have real grandparents from my side of the family at all.
And now the pebble hit the bottom of the lake.
I felt it thud into the tectonic plates on which my life had been built. It caused such a seismic shift that all of my memories, all of my experiences and all that I had held to be true and to have been built on such solid foundations, began crumbling and crashing down with a relentless and awesome disintegration.
None of my relations were related to me. All of them had helped perpetuate the lie. Every one of them knew the truth. How often had they had to be reminded to be careful not to say anything? To not let the dreadful secret out from its dark hiding place inside their heart?
Why had they all chosen to conspire against me? I had been a small child, for god’s sake. What harm had I done? Why wouldn’t they have told me?
When I was eleven years old, I had known a boy at school who was adopted. He knew. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He wasn’t bullied because of it. Why was he told by his “parents” and why was I not told by mine? What was their purpose in hiding the truth from me?
An urge to leave the house welled up inside me. I looked around the room for my mobile phone. I wanted to ring Neil and have him come and pick me up. It was downstairs, in my handbag.
I needed desperately to get away. Away from this house and away from these people.
I pulled the duvet off me and grabbed my suitcase. I had already hung some of my clothes on hangers and folded others into drawers. Now I tore them from the wardrobe and hurled them into the suitcase. No order and no care.
The bedroom curtains fluttered in the breeze from the open window. The curtains separated in the middle and I caught a glimpse of the back garden. The old swing frame was still there. The swing came off it when I was a child, but I persuaded Mum and Dad to keep the frame so I could still climb on it. Dad’s old shed stood beyond that. Dilapidated now, but as a child I had thought it a wonderful place. He used to clear all the garden tools out of it in the summer so I could use it as a den. The three of us even slept in there a few times. I used to worry that spiders would crawl into my hair during the night, but Dad told me that the woodlice would eat the spiders before they got anywhere near us.
Deceivers and liars?
If only they had told me. If only I had always known, like the boy at my school. He was fine. I would have been fine too.
Hundreds of kids were adopted. Thousands, probably. Some had difficulties, I knew that, but Mum and Dad were good people. They would have made it alright.
But they didn’t tell me.
If I had known, I could have dealt with my current situation differently. I would have had more time. Time to find my real parents. Perhaps I would have made contact with them anyway by now. Then I would know if there had been any mental illness in the family. In my family.
The curtains stopped moving as the breeze died.
I looked around the room. My bedroom. I had always loved it. It was the first room at the top of the stairs.
‘That’s because you’re the most important person in the house.’ Dad had said.
When I got older, I realised it was just because it was the middle-sized bedroom of the three. They had the biggest, then I had the middle-sized. The small bedroom was always just a place for laundry.
But that still didn’t prevent me from feeling important.
Some of my books still sat on the bookshelf. My old teddy sat next to them. He looked like he was smiling.
I stopped throwing clothes into the suitcase and opened the bedroom door. Just a few inches. Then I sat on the bed.
I shut my eyes and kicked my legs, just like I used to do when I was smaller and my legs couldn’t reach the floor. I listened for voices. No low, mumbling. Nothing shrill. All three of us were quiet. All of us alone in the same house. All consumed by raw thoughts that had not existed before now.
I opened my eyes and looked through the crack in the door. There were no ghosts or monsters out there. Nothing dark or evil waited for me. Just empty hooks on the wall where the photo frames had hung before I knocked them off.
> Me and Dad — fishing.
I did have a childhood. A good one. Whenever I hurt myself, those personal moments of pain, Mum had been there, wiping away the blood, sticking the plasters down, smudging away my tears. And she protected me from the monsters and ghosts without even realising it, just from her voice drifting up the stairs. She helped me through all the embarrassing things I had to go through as a teenager, and as a young woman. She helped me to feel less embarrassed.
They had virtually thrown a party when I dumped my old boyfriend and met Neil.
And they poured their love onto Michael and Rose. Filled their hearts with love.
Even now, I knew they were there for me.
They had re-opened the door of their home to me. A home I had not lived in for almost twenty years, and they made me feel as though I had been gone no more than a day. The same bedroom, the same house, the same them. It was as though their lives had been on hold, waiting for me to come back. To make the family unit whole again.
They had always been good people. Always. But even good people can’t be good all the time.
If Roy and Diane, good people, and good parents, had kept something like this from me, there must have been a reason for it. Just as there was a reason for the old swing frame still waiting in the back garden, and my old teddy bear still smiling at me from the bookshelf.
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